Torture is Not Unconstitutional
There has been considerable discussion, along with left-wing bleating about President Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, over the use of waterboarding and similar techniques to extract information from captured terrorists. The fact that everyone seems to be ignoring is that the U.S. Constitution does not outlaw torture for the express purpose of saving innocent lives.
Amendment V. No person ..shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.
Amendment VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
We invite any of our readers to show us anything in the above statements that makes it illegal or unconstitutional to use medieval tortures, much less waterboarding, to find out where terrorists have taken a hostage or planted a bomb. Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood provided a fictional but outstanding example.
In the movie Dirty Harry, the Scorpio killer buried a teenage girl alive with only enough air to last for a few hours. He bragged about this to the detective played by Clint Eastwood, and he figured that he could get away with it because he planned to murder Detective Callahan after gloating. Callahan, however, turned the tables on him, shot him in the leg, and then denied him medical assistance until he disclosed where he had buried his victim.
The scene was dubbed “controversial” at the time, but we do not even understand what was controversial. The laws of every state sanction the use of reasonable and necessary force, whether by law enforcement or civilians, to terminate a deadly threat to innocent people. In 999 out of 1000 cases (or more), this usually involves shooting the aggressor until he is no longer capable of perpetrating murder, armed robbery, arson of an occupied building (most states don’t allow the use of deadly force to protect only property), rape, kidnapping, or a similar violent crime that puts an innocent person’s life or physical safety at risk.
There are, however, rare situations in which someone is committing a crime by remote control, e.g. by burying a hostage alive as shown in Dirty Harry, or planting a bomb whose explosion will endanger dozens of innocent people. In such situations, killing a perpetrator who has information that can be used to save the innocent people is neither reasonable nor necessary. It is in fact unreasonable because it destroys whatever chance there might be of saving the victims.
Suppose, for example, that Iraqi terrorists capture a journalist, and drive away with her for the purpose of sawing her head off while chanting to Allah. During the kidnapping, however, one of the terrorists is wounded, left behind, and captured. Anything that his captors do to him to find out where the hostage was taken is acceptable. The purpose of this exercise is not punishment (they are not trying to modify his behavior, make an example of him, or take revenge on him) or extraction of a confession, since they aren’t going to use it against him in court. Its sole purpose is to get the information that is necessary to save the hostage.
If word comes in an hour later that the hostage is already dead, the torture has to stop immediately–because its continuation at that point could only constitute vigilante justice (illegal and extrajudicial punishment). The same applies the instant the hostage is rescued. The sole justification, which we would accept without question were we on a jury, is the objective of saving the life of an innocent person.
The same reasoning applies, incidentally, to a terrorist who has planted an improvised explosive device. Terrorists, unlike uniformed soldiers, have no rights whatsoever under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and anything our Armed Forces do to a terrorist to prevent his bomb from blowing the limbs off a man or woman in uniform is acceptable to us.
We mentioned juries. If you are ever called for jury duty, e.g. in a case in which police officers or Armed Forces personnel roughed up a terrorist to get information with which to save innocent lives, you do not have to follow the judge’s instructions or enforce a politically-correct law with which you disagree. More information is available from the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA).
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